I knew there were different logging levels in SSIS, but I couldn’t recall the difference in levels. So I discussed about the difference with Koen. At first glance we thought that the biggest difference is the fact that performance logging only logs warnings and errors. So basically, you decrease the amount of messages logged, which should results in a slightly better performance. But is that really the case?

Different logging levels
In SSIS there are 4 different logging levels. So what are the options, and what’s the difference between them? You can read all about it on MSDN, but the short version is:

None: Logging is turned off
Basic (default value): All evens are logged, except custom- and diagnostic events
Performance: Only performance statistics, OnError and OnWarning events are logged
Verbose: All events are logged

The next questions is: where to change these options. For example, how do I change my logging level to performance?

SSISDB / Catalog
When you want to change the logging level for all your deployed SSIS packages, you could change the setting on your catalog. You can do that by opening the “Integration Services Catalogs” on your instance, right-click on your catalog, and choose an option for “Server-wide Default Logging Level”:

If you change this, the logging level for all packages in this catalog will change. But maybe you don’t want that, and you only want it for a specific package.

SQL Server Agent Job
Another option is do configure this in your SQL Server Agent job:

If you use this option, the logging level will change for the package that is executed in the job step. So no permanent change, but only for the duration of the job.

At package execution
Another option is to do it at package runtime:

Personally I don’t use that option of executing packages, but you might. The same applies as the change on the SQL Server Agent job, this will only change the option for the duration of the execution, so no permanent change.

How to determine your best choice
Making a good decision is difficult in this case. When something goes wrong, you want to log everything. But when things run smoothly, it’s a waste of time to log every event that passes by in SSIS. And how do you determine the level of logging you need, without knowing what data is in your SSISDB? If you want to analyze that, you could use a query like this:

SELECT
EventCounts.EventName,
EventCounts.NumberOfEvents,
CONVERT(FLOAT,(CONVERT(FLOAT,[NumberOfEvents]) / SUM(NumberOfEvents) OVER ()) * 100) AS 'Percentage'
FROM
(
SELECT
EM.event_name AS 'EventName',
COUNT(*) AS 'NumberOfEvents'
FROM SSISDB.catalog.event_messages AS EM
WHERE EM.event_name IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY EM.event_name
) EventCounts
ORDER BY EventCounts.EventName ASC

This shows you the type of events stored in your SSISDB, the amount of events, and a percentage over the whole dataset. This can help you determine the logging level you need in your specific case.

But here’s the catch…
Performance logging doesn’t actually make your packages run faster… Koen sent me this blog post from Matt Masson (Blog | @mattmasson). In his blog post, he explains what events are logged at the specific levels. And this is what he says about performance level:

The Performance log level should be used when you are doing benchmarking and performance tuning for your packages. While it actually logs less messages to the [catalog].[operation_messages] view than Basic, it captures a lot more events internally to analyze the performance of the data flow components. As a result, there is a bit more overhead during execution – packages run with Basic will actually run a little faster than Performance (in this case Performance means “give me all of the performance details”, not “run my packages as fast as you can”).

Conclusion
Even though SSIS is easy to use, there are some pros and cons. The longer I work with SSIS (and that’s not on a daily basis), the more of these pitfalls I discover. And even though they can be fixed pretty fast, it normally takes you time to figure out the problem, because I’m not that familiar with the inner-workings of SSIS. And even when you think you have found a solution for your problem, SSIS just works slightly different than expected. I’m just glad I have friends like Koen to help me out when needed! Thanks again Koen!

Two weeks ago I encountered some strange issues with the SSISDB. Packages and processes started failing, and all we could find is this error message:

The image above is an extract of the standard SSMS “All Executions” report. You can find this by right-clicking your SSISDB, click on Reports, then Standard Reports, and choose the “All Executions” report.

While the packages started failing, we couldn’t find a cause. Deploying new packages wasn’t possible either. There were no events logged in the report, in the Windows event viewer, or in the SQL Server error log. So there was no starting point to further investigate this issue.

Finding the cause
Checking the size of the SSISDB showed some possible cause of the issue: it was 72GB big! This seemed odd, because we don’t store a lot of packages in the SSISDB. I knew SSISDB contained some logging information, but I didn’t knew how much. Checking the “Disk usage per table” report (another standard report in SSMS), the problem became a bit more obvious:

So basically there were over 67 million records in the database! This shouldn’t have happened, because the log retention should be set so 14 days. But we quickly found the problem:

The retention was set to 365 days. This could only mean the the SSISDB was re-created, and this setting wasn’t changed after the deploy. This resulted in a lot of extra logging data in the database. Because of the amount of record, the standard “SSISDB Maintenance job” ran for 40+ minutes, instead of a maximum of 8 minutes (which it normally needs to clean up logging). But setting the retention to 14 days and running the maintenance job would just result in an endless running job. So how could you prevent that?

Grabbing the bigger hammer
In most cases, grabbing a bigger hammer to solve the problem isn’t your best option. In this case, I didn’t see another way. After some searching, I found this blog post about truncating the log tables in SSISDB. Below you find the copy of the script. The credits for this script go to Ibrahim Naji (Blog | @thinknook).

After running this on the test environment, I found out it worked as I expected. I started the script on production (where the problem was found in the first place), and when it finished I changed the retention from 365 to 14 days:

After doing that, I ran the “SSISDB Maintenance job” (which ran fine), and an SSIS package as a test (worked fine as well). And looking at the record counts, it worked fine:

I’m not saying you should run this on your system, but I’m just saying this works fine on my system, and in my specific case. If you find any code on the internet, test it on a non-critical system first, before you run it in production!!!

Conclusion
Having error logging is a good thing. It can help you determine problems, and you can see if and how process grow over time. But too much logging for SSIS causes performance issues, prevents you from deploying new packages, and can even cause unexpected termination of SSIS packages. One way to prevent that is by changing the history retention of your SSISDB.